Pop up Detroit!

(originally published 4/1/11 in KnightBlog)

Pop Up Detroit is back. The temporary art gallery that periodically pops up around town started building a reputation last year as a showcase for Detroit's young artists and overlooked spaces. It premiered last fall in the Kresge Building downtown, followed by a Midtown Noel Night appearance in a vacant Art Deco auto showroom. This time, organizers Michelle Tanguay and Nina Marcus-Kurlonko are setting up shop at 71 Garfield, a recently redeveloped,green live-work space for artists in the Sugar Hill Arts District.

Eighteen visual artists, from the emerging to the established, are participating in the show, which opens Saturday, April 9. I asked Tanguay and Marcus-Kurlonko about their project, the upcoming show, and the space.

Read the rest at KnightBlog.

Material dreams at the N'Namdi Gallery

(originally published 3/29/11 in KnightBlog)

If you haven't visited the N'Namdi Center for Contemporary Art since it opened in the Sugar Hill Arts District last October, now's an excellent time. The splendid, 16,000 square foot facility is currently hosting its first curated show, New Departures and Transitions: Medium, Materiality and Immateriality. (Additionally, there are three other shows by individual artists on display in auxiliary galleries, each of which is worth a look.)

Curated by critic and College for Creative Studies instructor Michael Stone-Richards, New Departures and Transitions exhibits work by more than fifteen artists, some local, some national. (It's interesting, though, how the show succeeds in breaking down geographic distinctions; Industrialization, shown below, is by the New York artist Chaikia Booker, but its chaotic texture and sense of post-industrial anxiety look like something straight out of the Cass Corridor.)

The many, disparate works on display are unified by a shared sense of self-conscious materiality. They insist that you consider the materials used in their construction (tires, cable ties, encaustic paint, video, papier-mâché, and much more) as essential components of their meaning (or, in some cases, as their meaning).

Read the rest at KnightBlog.

Cranbrook show dazzles at DAM

(originally published 3/8/11 in KnightBlog)

The annual Detroit Artists Market (DAM) Scholarship and Exhibition Programopened Friday at DAM’s midtown gallery. It features work by nine Cranbrook Academy of Art graduate students, all finalists for DAM's John F. Korachis Scholarship Award, as well as a handful of alumni. The exhibition commemorates more than 75 years of support provided by Cranbrook and DAM to the local arts community. All the pieces are for sale.

There's a wealth and variety of exceptional work to see. In content and form, the pieces are all over the map, from monumental oil reliefs to funny, tawdry fabric sculptures and dreamy, painted leisure scenes.

Read the rest at KnightBlog.

Merce Cunningham Legacy Tour

Sketches of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's performance at the Power Center in Ann Arbor, Feb. 18, 2011

The company performed two pieces: 1976's Squaregame, resurrected for this farewell tour, and 2003's Split Sides, a noted collaboration with the art rock bands Sigur Rós and Radiohead.

Squaregame

As the front curtain opened, it became clear that every other curtain on the stage was up, too, revealing in vivid light all that's usually obscured, backstage, during a performance: tall ladders, machinery, massive crates stacked five or six high, countless cords and dollies, wires and thick ropes. It was a rich visual cacophony, and the stage space seemed suddenly huge. After the dance began, there were moments when I stopped paying attention to the dancers and focused instead on the staggering landscape of things that surrounded them.


The dancers performed on a white square, bordered on two sides by astroturf. Their costumes were '70s rehearsal clothes in soft, muted colors. White cylindrical canvas bags, full but light, served as props and set decoration.


The movement quality in this dance was especially fragmented; individual body parts were especially articulate. It seemed to be a dance about joints. It's also a dance about watching, because frequently, dancers sat down, alone or in groups, to carefully watch the others.


Robert Swinston, the dancer who performed the solo originally danced by Cunningham, looked remarkably like the late choreographer, both in appearance and movement style. The effect was uncanny and disorienting, and I felt momentarily out of time.


The score, by Takehisa Kosugi, is better described as electronic sound art than music. It undulated and burbled, submitting sounds of the human voice to processes and modulations that resulted in a kind of globular, biological soup. I kept imagining the contractions of the dancers' muscles, and in extreme close-up, the movement of their and cells and blood.


Finale: several dancers are running, and one takes a canvas bags and hurls it into the air directly above him. It soars; he catches it. Lights out.


Split Sides

Cunningham, like his partner and collaborator, the composer John Cage, was known for using chance in the composition and performance of his dances. This piece, comprised of two different sections, has 32 possible permutations. On stage, before the performance, five rolls of a die determine the order of the two dances, as well as the two distinct costumes, set designs, lighting cues and scores. Seeing a live dance is a rare thing. Seeing any one of the 32 versions of this dance is rarer still.


We heard Sigur Rós' music first and Radiohead's second. Both bands fashioned relatively challenging soundscapes that respect Cunningham's avant garde musical legacy.


The Sigur Rós piece moved from poignant, tender warmth to sparse hesitation, and from that to a shrill, screeching feedback assault. It included minimalist music box textures, metronomic beeping, and delicate sounds produced by pairs of miked ballet shoes, which we could see being "played" in the pit. (To create a slow, scratchy breathing sound, a musician gently dragged a pair of violin bows across the shoes.)


The Radiohead score was more aggressive, difficult and dissonant. It's the one that might have caused a few people near us to get up and walk out. (I was glad to see that a Cunningham concert can still ruffle a few feathers.) It made extraordinary use of stereo, the sound swinging hugely from one side of the room to the other. It included (briefly) what I thought was the only false step of the night, a documentary-style recording of an ominous, ranting Christian man. This felt too specific, too obvious. (But as Michel pointed out later, the piece premiered when we were still under the righteous, heavy hand of Bush II, when such sounds probably had more power to chill.)


The biological imagery of Kosugi's Squaregame score was transferred to the costumes in Split Sides. Golden and deep pink in the first half of the performance, black and silver in the second, both sets of costumes featured expressionistic splatters and lines that traced like tree branches or veins. The silver and black costumes fit the dancers like a second skin, lending them a sort of metallic, extraterrestrial quality (only enhanced by their characteristically "unnatural" movements and an important, repeated gesture: craning their necks, they tilted their faces expectantly to the sky).


There was so much to see in this dance. Too much, in fact. Cunningham was known for quoting Einstein: "There are no fixed points in space." He applied this principle to his dancers, telling them that whichever way they happened to be facing was front, and constructing his staging so that it reflected a vision of "many centers." In doing so, he liberates the spectator from the pressure to see everything; since so many dancers are on stage doing so much at once, alone or in groups, seeing everything becomes physically impossible. I felt free, therefore, to spend whole minutes watching only two dancers after they suddenly came together and danced a smiling, joyful duet amid the controlled chaos of other moving bodies. For the same minutes, those two dancers must have only skirted the edges of another spectator's vision; this, in aggregate, is the kind of perceptual freedom that a Cunningham dance offers.


During the post-performance Q & A, Robert Swinston talked about the future of the dances, now that Cunningham has died & the company is disbanding. He said that there will be a small group of dancers who will be taught the dances and who will pass them on to other companies and later generations. I am in love with this absurdly romantic idea: a chosen fraternity of artist/athlete/disciples, dancing not to perform, but to remember.


Shortly after Split Sides began, the house lights came up, momentarily disorienting the audience. For no more than 20 or 30 seconds, we were nearly as illuminated as the dancers, who continued uninterrupted. I felt certain that this was intentional, but later learned that the lights had been inadvertently triggered, a mistake that was corrected for the next night's performance. How lucky to have been there for this extraordinary misstep, which couldn't have been better-suited to Cunningham's work. The choreographer spoke often of waking audiences rather than lulling or hypnotizing them, and the quality of the gradually brightening light, accompanied by the then-tender Sigur Rós music, was dawn-like. Chance was an integral part of Cunningham's work, and by chance alone, Split Sides echoed the meta-performative aspects of Squaregame. The accidental light compelled us to look away from the dancers and around at one another; it reminded us that we were members of an audience, all watching the same dance, yet each, alone, watching our own.

Moments of being: Andre Kertesz at the DIA

(originally published 3/11/11 in KnightBlog)

If you haven’t been to the Detroit Institute of Arts’ photography gallery lately, stop by and check out the current show, An Intuitive Eye: André Kertész Photographs 1914-1969. This generous exhibition of elegant black and white images traces the influential modernist’s career from Hungary, where it began, to Paris in 1925 and New York in 1936. The work from each period is distinct, but consistently displays an extraordinary sensitivity to shadow, light and geometry, a sensitivity that DIA associate curator Nancy Barr describes as “unique in [Kertész’s] time.”

As one of the first street photographers, Kertész captured spontaneous moments of urban activity while emphasizing the lines, shapes, planes and textures that such moments consist of (visually, anyway). The show features many of these remarkable, candid shots, but also draws attention to his still life and portrait work, which is no less riveting.

Read the rest at KnightBlog.

Review: If on a winter's night a traveler

Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler (1979) is one of those delightful books that arrived on my shelf unbidden and unknown, and proved to be exactly what I didn't know I was looking for.

The copy I read, a 1981 translation by William Weaver from the original Italian, was given to Michel by a coworker as a secret Santa gift, along with a copy of Yukio Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea ("a novel of the homicidal hysteria that lies latent in the Japanese character," screams the deeply embarrassing 1965 cover). Both worn, yellowing paperbacks were excavated from my favorite Detroit treasure trove, the massive book store John K. King Used & Rare Books, so I found myself naturally endeared to each. But which to read? With Michel in the middle of a couple other books and just starting his semester, I had my pick. I was drawn to the Mishima first, since I was (obviously) curious to learn more about the "astounding masterpiece of taut violence" that exposed the murderous mania apparently hidden deep in the soul of the Japanese people, but then Michel said that I should read the first few pages of the Calvino if I hadn't already. I'll reproduce the first paragraphs so you can see what persuaded me to switch:

"You are about the begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on the in the next room. Tell the others right away, 'No, I don't want to watch TV!' Raise your voice--they won't hear you otherwise--'I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!' Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: 'I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!' Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone.

Find the most comfortable position: seated, stretched out, curled up, or lying flat. Flat on your back, on your side, on your stomach. In an easy chair, on the sofa, in the rocker, the deck chair, or a hassock. In the hammock, if you have a hammock. On top of your bed, of course, or in the bed. You can even stand on your hands, head down, in the yoga position. With the book upside down, naturally."

Naturally, I was hooked. Calvino's novel is a smart, labyrinthine, postmodern adventure in bibliomania. (If you're overfamiliar with and/or suspicious of pomo trickery and reflexivity, it might not be for you. I've still sampled only selectively from the postmodern corpus, and only from the work of American authors, so I was sufficiently delighted and titillated.) And if the descriptor "postmodern" makes the book sound laborious or tedious to slug through, it's far from it. You can get a sense of Calvino's sly, playful style from the excerpted paragraphs; it's a joy to read.

The plot concerns you, the Reader. You're reading Italo Calvino's new novel If on a winter's night a traveler, about a mysterious man in a train station, and enjoying it quite a bit -- until you realize that after p. 32, the novel returns to p. 17. From there, it proceeds again only until p. 32, and then starts once more at p. 17. In fact, the whole book's like this. (Well, not the book you're reading. I mean the real you, not the fictional you. Calvino merely describes this maddening publisher's error; he doesn't make the real you actually read it.) Anyway, back to the fictional you: you're terribly upset that you can't finish the novel you're so enjoying, so you go to the bookstore where you bought it to demand a new copy. It's there that you meet the Other Reader, a young woman with huge eyes, exacting literary sensibilities, and a capacious memory for the details of the numerous books she loves. She too is there to demand a new copy of the botched Calvino novel, and you're immediately...intrigued.

And so the romance begins. You and the Other Reader seek out the rest of the text of If on a winter's night a traveler, but when you find it, you realize that it's not the same novel at all. As it turns out, the new text that you have your hands on is also quite good, but also incomplete, leading you to find the rest of that novel. You might imagine where this is going: If on a winter's night alternates between two threads: one follows you and the sometimes-aloof Other Reader on your increasingly disorienting quest to find a novel that keeps morphing into others, and the other consists of the first chapters of each of these incomplete novels (ten in all, each by a different fictional author, taking place in a different country, and all with vastly divergent plots). This Borgesian narrative maze might sound like it results in a frustrating reading experience, since you're being constantly yanked from each story right at the moment when you're really getting into it, but somehow it works. This is in part because the plots and styles of the different novels are so varied that you can't wait to see where the next one goes, and because the writing is so consistently good and the characters so singular and carefully sketched that it doesn't matter whether or not you finish the stories; it's a pleasure to spend any time with them at all. There's also the compelling adventure that's sustained in the parallel, second-person narrative, where you begin to realize that the baffling incompleteness of the ten novels is somehow deliberate, somehow connected.

This is a book lover's book (well, maybe a book fanatic's book) and just because it's a lot of fun doesn't mean that it doesn't ask important questions. It's interested in publishing, censorship, different ways of reading, different reasons for reading, choosing not to read, writing and its attendant anxieties, the relationship between text and reality, the relationship between author and text, and the relationship between reader and author (to start). But of paramount importance is the relationship between reader and text. Calvino (and Weaver, his translator) meditates in beautiful, ecstatic language about reading; it's the expansive, benevolent delight and pleasure the novel takes in the act of reading (again, recalling Borges) that left the strongest impression on me. For Calvino, reading is, among much else, "that invisible movement...the flow of gaze and breath, but, even more, the journey of the words through the person, their course or their arrest, their spurts, delays, pauses, the attention concentrating or straying, the returns, that journey that seems uniform and on the contrary is always shifting and uneven." I can't think of another book I've read about reading that was more satisfying to, well, read.

Oscar Wilde's tweets

"All good work looks perfectly modern."

"We should treat all trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality."

It struck me recently that Oscar Wilde would have written the best tweets. I'd been giving some thought to Twitter, which has crept its way into my life and which I feel a little ambivalently about. I like the (constrained) opportunity for self-expression it offers, since that aspect, for better or worse, appeals to my confessional, writerly ways. I also enjoy its triviality; I like that it's a bit of nonsense to break up the day, a series of tiny glimpses into the whims and scattered insights of the handful of friends I follow. When it's used for more serious, structured purposes, like One Book, One Twitter, I find myself annoyed. It's 140 characters, people; let's not pretend we can engage in a substantive literary exchange. (Surely we can think of something more trifling!) Of course, being the relatively serious-minded young man that I am, it's not like all of my tweets are flippant, or that I disapprove of tweets that disseminate important information (the opening of a new vegetarian restaurant in Detroit, say, or the fact that another Golden Girl has died). But even if I attempt to impart something serious in a tweet, I know that the sentiment will be nestled among my friends' friends' jaunty dispatches. It seems impossible, as a result, to take Twitter too seriously, and that's something I can appreciate.

But it's the flip side of these aspects that worry me. Self-expression? Just what I need: more performance space. Triviality? Well, that's OK in moderation, but what happens when all the trivial thoughts of you and your friends are aggregated? How much total time in a day is eaten up by constantly refreshing the feed? This is a legitimate contemporary concern, I think: are too many of us spending too much time tweeting (and facebooking, for that matter)? Should we be worried that our light, frothy desserts might be taking the place traditionally reserved for a nutritious entree? What are the cognitive risks of constantly expending the mental energy it takes to jump from one bit of flotsam to another? Should I be worried about how many times a day I refresh the damn thing? (It's starting to feel a bit like a habit, not a conscious choice, and I find that a little troubling.)

Peggy Orenstein writes eloquently in the New York Times about the distancing of self from experience that's a necessary part of being an active tweeter. She wonders, too, how much her experience of tweeting is shaping her life (rather than her life shaping her tweets), and she worries about the performative aspect of Twitter, about what "encouraging self promotion over self awareness" does to a person. So here we are, tweeting suspiciously, tweeting and wondering if we really should be.

Anyway, back to Oscar Wilde. The more I thought about Twitter and its potential pitfalls, the more it seemed that while it's been adopted by millions of us, it's probably best suited to the talents of a select few: people, that is, with a Wildean sensibility. Wilde, the consummate modern man, is known for building a reputation (in letters and in society) out of epigrams. He had an unparalleled talent for spinning a brief turn of phrase that could delight as immediately as it could give pause or confound. This was his genius. He specialized in the pithy paradox ("My duty is the thing I never do, on principle."), and the platitude turned upside-down and emptied ("Whenever one has anything unpleasant to say, one should always be quite candid."). He could skewer in seven words ("The best play I ever slept through.") as deftly as he could dash out an incisive truth about art ("It is the spectator, and not life, that Art really mirrors.") or politics ("Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people."). His epigrams are the meat of his work. They're a universe unto themselves; in them, Wilde is wise, flip, callous, hilarious, compassionate, witty, somber, and frequently contradictory. They're the reason his plays soar and his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, can feel clunky and earthbound; surrounding all those elegant bons mots with exposition and description makes them sound a bit stilted and plotted.

What's remarkably modern or, maybe more appropriately, contemporary about Wilde's aphorisms, is how well they stand on their own. Flipping through my copy of Ralph Keyes' The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde, I'm dimly aware that each epigram comes from some larger work, whether a play, essay, or even a conversation some acquaintance had the good sense to write down, yet the majority of them feel complete. They don't seem decontextualized; I rarely wonder what the lines were that preceded or followed them in their original circumstance. In this way, they're like tweets, and in this way, they feel contemporary. Wilde was essentially tweeting 130 years before anyone else was; his work prefigures our age of atomized self-expression and fragmented, public self-construction (not to mention an age in which literary works can be divided handily by technology into constituent fragments). It points to us, now, who emulate his style, whether we know it or not. For the literary types on Twitter, it has come to make Oscar Wildes of us all.

Whatever its pitfalls (real or imagined) Twitter is, among much else, a contemporary literary form. And it's a form best suited to a particular kind of literary talent: a flair for brevity and wit that is, delightfully, descended from a man who died before the previous century really even began. Practically none of us are as good at it as he was, but that's because he invented it.